I don’t want to forget why Bush won re-election to the Chairmanship. It was obvious to everyone that my guy was not going to win, nor was Badnarick or Nader. It was going to be Bush or Kerry.
This was a very charged and divisive race. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was the most polarizing election in American History, as some have stated, but it wasn’t a love-fest by any stretch of the imagination.
This time around, the issues didn’t really rise to the top of the campaign like they usually do. Normally there is discussion about what each candidate would do to improve education, protect Social Security, or clean up the environment. In the recent elections that I can recall, each candidate has taken a stand and drawn up plan to tackle each issue. This time, that didn’t really happen. The issues were limited to whether the Chairman screwed up the economy in his first term, or did he help the recovery. Did the Chairman make the right choice in going to war? Was his opponent consistent or a “flip-flopper”. Did his opponent dishonor his fellow soldiers when he returned home from Vietnam? Was he guilty of treason? (I think so, but that would didn’t get much use outside the blogosphere) It turned into a debate on which guy was worse for the job rather than who was better.
The polls were close all along. One guy would squeak out a small lead, and then the other would overtake him with a similar small lead. It was close to the very end.
I believe now, two days after the election, that the reason why Chairman Bush won re-election was because of the ballot initiatives to ban same-sex marriage in eleven states. Traditionally, Conservatives are far more likely to stay at home on election day. As many as 6 million Christians typically avoid the polls on the first Tuesday in November. This issue brought them out in droves though. I think that they see leftist policies coming out of both parties, and can’t get motivated enough to vote for either guy, but when something as big as same-sex marriage is left to them to decide on, they feel called to act.
Ohio became the deciding state this year. In the end, the candidate that won Ohio would take the election. The polls before election day in Ohio were very close, but seemed to give Kerry a slight lead. Whether we trust polls or not is another story, but that’s what they said. Ohio was one of the states with a proposed Amendment to their State Constitution on the ballot to ban gay marriage. Without that Amendment proposal, I don’t believe that enough conservatives would have gone to the polls in Ohio and we’d be considering the next four years with Chairman John Kerry leading our government.